Leading Cisco down to the stream, he was amazed at how strong he felt. His paralysis at the sight of the afternoon raid, though he recalled it vividly, seemed something far away. Not dim, but far away, like history. It was a baptism, he concluded, a baptism that had catapulted him from imagination to reality. The warrior who had ridden up and barked at him had been real. The men who took Cisco had been real. He knew them now.
As Cisco fiddled with the water, splashing it with his lips, Lieutenant Dunbar let his mind run further along this vein of thought and struck pay dirt.
Waiting, he thought, That’s what I’ve been doing.
He shook his head, laughing inwardly to himself. I’ve been waiting. He chucked a stone into the water. Waiting for what? For someone to find me? For Indians to take my horse? To see a buffalo?
He couldn’t believe himself. He’d never walked on eggs, and yet that was what he’d been doing these last weeks. Walking on eggs, waiting for something to happen.
I better put a stop to this right now, he said to himself.
Before he could think any further, his eyes caught something. Color was reflecting off the water on the other side of the stream.
Lieutenant Dunbar glanced up the slope behind him.
An enormous harvest moon was beginning to rise.
On pure impulse, he swung onto Cisco’s back and rode to the top of the bluff.
It was a magnificent sight, this great moon, bright as an egg yolk, filling the night sky as if it were a whole new world come to call just on him.
He hopped off Cisco, made himself a smoke, and watched spellbound as the moon climbed quickly overhead, its gradations of topography clear as a map.
As it rose, the prairie grew brighter and brighter. He had known only darkness on previous nights, and this flood of illumination was something like an ocean suddenly drained of its water.
He had to go into it.
They rode at a walk for half an hour, and Dunbar enjoyed every minute of it. When he finally turned back, he was charged with confidence.
Now he was glad for all that had happened. He wasn’t going to mope anymore about soldiers who refused to arrive. He was not going to change his sleeping habits. He was not going to patrol in scared little circles, and he was not going to pass any more nights with one ear and one eye open.
He wasn’t going to wait any longer. He was going to force the issue.
Tomorrow morning he was going to ride out and find the Indians.
And what if they ate him up?
Well, if they ate him up, the devil could have the leftovers.
But there would be no more waiting.
four
When she opened her eyes at dawn, the first thing she saw was another pair of eyes. Then she realized there were several sets of eyes staring down at her. It all came rushing back, and Stands With A Fist felt a sudden wave of embarrassment at all this attention. She’d made the attempt in such an undignified, un-Comanche-like way.
She wanted to hide her face.
They asked her how she felt and if she wanted to eat, and Stands With A Fist said yes, she felt better, and yes, it would be good to eat.
While she ate she watched the women go about their little bits of business, and this, along with the sleep and the food, had a restorative effect. Life was moving ahead, and seeing this made her feel more like a person again.
But when she felt around for her heart, she could tell by the stabbing that it was broken. It would have to be healed if she was to continue in this life, and that could be best accomplished with a reasoned and thorough mourning.
She must mourn for her husband.
To do that properly she must leave the lodge.
It was still early when she made ready to go. They braided her tangled hair and sent two youngsters off on errands: one to fetch her best dress, the other to cut one of her husband’s ponies from the herd.
No one discouraged her when Stands With A Fist ran a belt through the scabbard of her finest knife and fastened it at her waist. They had prevented something irrational the day before, but she was calmer now, and if Stands With A Fist still wanted to take her life, then so be it. Many women had done so in years past.
They trailed behind her as she walked out of the lodge, so beautiful and strange and sad. One of them gave her a leg up onto the pony. Then the pony and the woman walked away, heading out of the basin that held the camp and onto the open prairie.
No one cried after her, no one wept, and no one waved good-bye. They only watched her go. But each of her friends was hoping she would not be too hard on herself and that she would come back.
All of them were fond of Stands With A Fist.
five
Lieutenant Dunbar was hurrying through his preparations. He’d already slept past sunrise and he’d wanted to be up at dawn. So he hurried through his coffee, puffing away on his first cigarette while his mind tried to order everything as efficiently as possible.
He jumped on the dirty work first, starting with the flag on the supply house. It was newer than the one flying from his own quarters, so he climbed the crumbling sod wall and pulled it down.
He split a corral pole, shoved it into the side of his boot, and, after careful measurement, lopped a few inches off the top. Then he attached the flag. It didn’t look bad.
He worked for more than an hour on Cisco, trimming up the fetlocks around each hoof, combing out his mane and tail, and greasing the heavy black hair of both with bacon fat.
Most of the time was spent on his coat. Lieutenant Dunbar rubbed it out and brushed it down a half-dozen times until, at last, he stepped back and saw that there was no point in doing more. The buckskin was shining like something on the glossy page of a picture book.
He tied his horse up short, to keep him from lying down in the dust, and hustled back to the sod hut. There, he pulled out his dress uniform and went over every inch with a fine brush, snatching off stray hairs and flicking away the smallest balls of lint. He polished all the buttons. If he’d had paint, he might have touched up the epaulets and yellow stripes running down the outside of each trouser leg. He made do with the brush and a little spittle. When he was done the uniform looked more than passable.
He spit-shined his new knee-length riding boots and set them next to the uniform he’d laid out on the bed.
When it was finally time to work on himself, he picked up a rough towel and his shaving kit and hotfooted it down to the stream. He jumped in, soaped himself down, rinsed, and jumped back out, the whole operation taking less than five minutes. Taking care not to nick himself, the lieutenant shaved twice. When he could run a hand over his jaw and neck without hitting a whisker, he scampered back up the bluff and got dressed.
six
Cisco bent his neck and stared quizzically at the figure coming toward him, paying special attention to the bright red sash fluttering at the man’s waist. Even if the sash had not been there, it’s likely the horse’s eyes would have remained fixed. No one had seen Lieutenant Dunbar in quite this form before. Cisco certainly hadn’t, and he knew his master as well as anyone.
The lieutenant always dressed to get by, putting little emphasis on the glitter of parades or inspections or meetings with generals.
But if the finest army minds had put their heads together in order to produce the ultimate junior officer, they would have fallen far short of what Lieutenant Dunbar had wrought on this crystal-clear May morning.
Right down to the big Navy revolver swinging gently at his hip, he was every young girl’s dream of the man in uniform. The vision he presented was so full of dash and sparkle that no feminine heart could have failed to skip a beat at the sight of him. The most cynical head would have been compelled to turn, and the tightest lips would have found themselves forming the words:
“Who is that?”
After slipping the bit into Cisco’s mouth, he grabbed a hunk of mane and swung effortlessly onto the buckskin’s glossy back. They trotted over to the supply house, w
here the lieutenant leaned down and picked up the guidon and flag leaning against the wall. He slid the staff into his left boot, grasped the standard with his left hand, and guided Cisco toward the open prairie.
When he’d gone a hundred yards Dunbar stopped and looked back, knowing there was a possibility he would never see this place again. He glanced at the sun and saw that it was no later than midmorning. He would have plenty of time to find them. Off to the west he could see the flat, smoky cloud that had appeared three mornings in a row. That would have to be them.
The lieutenant looked down at the toes of his boots. They were reflecting the sunlight. A little sigh of doubt came out of him, and for a split second he wished for a stiff shot of whiskey. Then he clucked to Cisco, and the little horse rolled into a lope that carried them west. The breeze was up and Old Glory was popping as he rode out to meet . . . to meet he knew not what.
But he was going.
seven
Without being planned at all, Stands With A Fist’s mourning was highly ritualistic.
She had no intention of dying now. What she wanted was to clean out the warehouse of grief inside her. She wanted the most thorough cleansing possible, and so she took her time.
Quiet and methodical, she rode for almost an hour before she happened upon a spot that suited her, a place where the gods were likely to congregate.
To one who lived on the prairie it would pass for a hill. To anyone else it would have been nothing more than a bump on the land, like a small swell on a broad, flat sea. There was a single tree at its crest, a knobby old oak that somehow clung to life despite being mangled through the years by passersby. In every direction it was the only tree she could see.
It was a very lonely place. It seemed just right. She climbed to the top, slid off her pony, walked a few feet down the backside of the slope, and sat cross-legged on the ground.
The breeze was bouncing her braids around, so she reached up, undid them both, and let her cherry-colored hair fly in the wind. Then she closed her eyes, began to rock quietly back and forth, and concentrated on the terrible thing that had happened in her life, concentrated on it to the exclusion of all else.
Not many minutes later, the words to a song took shape in her head. She opened her mouth and verses tumbled out, as sure and strong as something she had diligently rehearsed.
Her singing was high. Sometimes her voice cracked. But she sang with her whole heart, with a beauty far surpassing something sweet to the ear.
The first was a simple song, celebrating his virtues as a warrior and a husband. Toward the end of it, a couplet came to her. It went:
“He was a great man,
He was great to me.”
She paused before she sang these lines. Lifting her closed eyes to the sky, Stands With A Fist pulled her knife from its scabbard and deliberately sliced a two-inch cut on her forearm. She dropped her head and peeked at the cut. The blood was coming well. She resumed her singing, holding the knife fast in one hand.
She slashed herself several more times in the next hour. The incisions were shallow, but they produced a lot of blood, and this pleased Stands With A Fist. As her head grew lighter, her concentration grew stronger.
The singing was good. It told the whole story of their lives in a way that talking to someone wouldn’t. Without going into detail, she left out nothing.
At last, when she’d made up a beautiful verse imploring the Great Spirit to give him an honored place in the world beyond the sun, a sudden surge of emotion hit her. There was little she hadn’t covered. She was finishing, and that meant good-bye.
Tears flooded her eyes as she hiked up the doeskin dress to slash one of her thighs. She drew the blade across her leg hastily and gave a little gasp. The cut was very deep this time. She must have hit a major vein or artery, because when Stands With A Fist looked down, she could see the red gushing out with every beat of her heart.
She could try to stop the bleeding or she could go on singing.
Stands With A Fist chose the latter. She sat with her feet stretched out, letting her blood soak into the ground as she lifted her head high and wailed the words:
“It will be good to die.
It will be good to go with him.
I will be going after.”
eight
Because the breeze was blowing into her face, she never heard the rider’s approach.
He’d noticed the slope from far out and decided that, since he’d seen nothing yet, it would be a good place to take a sighting. If he still couldn’t see anything when he got there, he might climb that old tree.
Lieutenant Dunbar was halfway up the rise when the wind brought a strange, sad sound to his ears. Going with caution, he cleared the slope’s crest and saw a person sitting a few feet down the hill, just in front of him. The person’s back was turned. He couldn’t say for sure whether it was a man or a woman. But it was definitely an Indian.
A singing Indian.
He was sitting still on Cisco’s back when the person turned to face him.
nine
She couldn’t have said what it was, but Stands With A Fist suddenly knew there was something standing behind her, and she turned to see.
She only caught a glimpse of the face below the hat before a surprise gust of wind whipped the colored flag around the man’s head.
But the glimpse was enough. It told her he was a white soldier.
She didn’t jump or run. There was something spellbinding about the image of the solitary horse soldier. The great colored flag and the shining pony and the sun blinking off the ornaments on his clothes. And now the face again as the flag unfurled: a hard, young face with shining eyes. Stands With A Fist blinked several times, unsure if she was seeing a vision or a person. Nothing had moved but the flag.
Then the soldier shifted his seat on the horse. He was real. She rolled to her knees and started to draw away down the slope. She didn’t make a sound, nor did she rush. Stands With A Fist had woken from one nightmare to find herself in another, one that was real. She moved slowly because she was too horrified to run.
ten
Dunbar was shocked when he saw her face. He didn’t say the words, not even in his head, but if he had, the lieutenant would have said something like, “What kind of woman is this?”
The sharp little face, the tangled cherry hair, and the intelligent eyes, wild enough to love or hate with equal intensity, had thrown him completely. It didn’t occur to him then that she might not be an Indian. Only one thing was on his mind at the moment.
He had never seen a woman who looked so original.
Before he could move or speak, she rolled to her knees, and he saw that she was covered with blood.
“Oh my God,” he gasped.
It wasn’t until she’d backed all the way down the slope that he raised his hand and called out softly.
“Wait.”
At the sound of the word, Stands With A Fist broke into a stumbling run. Lieutenant Dunbar trotted after her, pleading for her to stop. When he had closed to within a few yards, Stands With A Fist glanced back, lost her footing, and went down in the high grass.
When he got to her she was crawling, and every time he tried to reach down he had to pull away, as if afraid to touch a wounded animal. When he finally took her around the shoulders, she flipped onto her back and clawed out at his face.
“You’re hurt,” he said, batting away her hands. “You’re hurt.”
For a few seconds she fought hard, but the steam went out of her fast and he had her by the wrists in no time. With the last of her strength she bucked and kicked under him. And when she did, something bizarre happened.
In the delirium of her struggle an old English word, one she hadn’t spoken for many years, came to her. It slipped out of her mouth before she could stop it.
“Don’t,” she said.
It gave them both pause. Lieutenant Dunbar couldn’t believe he’d heard it, and Stands With A Fist couldn’t believe she’d said i
t.
She threw her head back and let her body sag against the ground. It was too much for her. She moaned a few Comanche words and passed out.
eleven
The woman in the grass continued to breathe. Most of her wounds were superficial, but the one on her thigh was dangerous. Blood was still seeping steadily from it, and the lieutenant kicked himself for having thrown away the red sash a mile or two back. It would have made a perfect tourniquet.
He’d been ready to throw away more. The longer he’d ridden and the less he’d seen, the more ridiculous his plan had seemed. He’d thrown the sash away as something useless, silly really, and was ready to fold up the flag (which also seemed silly) and return to Fort Sedgewick when he saw the rise and the solitary tree.
His belt was new and too stiff, so with the woman’s knife, he cut a strip out of the flag and tied it high on her thigh. The flow of blood diminished right away, but he still needed a compress. He stripped off his uniform, wriggled out of his long johns, and cut the underwear in half. Then he wadded up the top and pressed it against the deep gash.
For ten terrible minutes Lieutenant Dunbar knelt next to her, naked in the grass, both hands pushing hard against the compress. Once during that time he thought she may have died. He placed a tentative ear on her breast and listened. Her heart was still thumping.
Working there by himself was difficult and nerve-racking, not knowing who the woman was, not knowing whether she would live or die. It was hot in the grass at the base of the slope, and every time he brushed at the sweat dripping into his eyes, he left a streak of her blood on his face. Off and on he would lift the compress and take a look. And each time he would stare in frustration at the blood that refused to stop. Then he would replace the compress.
But he stayed with it.
Finally, when the blood had slowed to a trickle, he went into action. The thigh wound needed to be sewn shut, but that was impossible. He cut a leg off the long underwear, folded it into a dressing, and laid it flat on the wound. Then, working as fast as he could, the lieutenant cut another strip from the flag and tied it securely around the bandage. He repeated this process with the lesser arm wounds.